


Bottle it Up

by mapcake



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 07:31:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3111335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapcake/pseuds/mapcake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You can’t see it, but below deck there’s a perfect replica of you with a dozen sailors in attendance.”<br/>“You tease. [laughs] I’m sure there isn’t.”</p><p>Isabela tries to get over her feelings for Hawke during those three years between acts 2 and 3.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bottle it Up

It was stupid of her, she knows, but when Isabela left Kirkwall, she took the little ship in a bottle that Hawke had given her. It was a spur of the moment thing; Hawke had finally woken up after a day of healing from her wounds, and Isabela couldn’t bear to face her, so she packed up in a flurry and left on the first ship out of Kirkwall. She hadn’t even realized that she’d grabbed the bottle until she emptied out her pack two hours later, and the bottle tumbled out, her hand instinctually shooting out to catch it before it fell off her cot and hit the ground.

She stares at it, then — just stands there and stares at it until a knock on her door jolts her out of her stupor.

“You decent?” calls a female voice, likely one of the women she’s sharing a cabin with.

“Yeah,” Isabela says, setting the bottle down carefully on top of her clothes. The door creaks as it opens, and the woman introduces herself politely, but Isabela barely hears her.

Once she leaves, Isabela picks up the bottle again, holding it loosely in one hand above the floor. Two heartbeats later, she swears and puts it back in her pack.

She doesn’t open her pack again for the rest of the trip.

* * *

“That’s pretty,” remarks the most recent of Isabela’s long string of bedmates.

“What is?” Isabela mumbles into her pillow, eyebrows furrowing in slight irritation. The girl was by no means a bad lover (Isabela had, in fact, come twice that night), but for some reason, like all the lovers before her, the sex hadn’t sated that frustrating little ache in Isabela’s core.

“That boat in a bottle, on top of the nightstand.” The bed creaks as the girl shifts, and Isabela huffs when she feels the sheet slide off her shoulders. “Can I have a closer look at it?”

Isabela’s eyes snap open, and she finds the girl propped up on her forearms, reaching for the bottle. “No!” she shouts, startling even herself with the sharpness of her voice. Recovering quickly, she rolls on top of the girl, straddling her. “I can think of much better uses for your hands, sweet thing,” she drawls, and the girl laughs, leaning up to nip at Isabela’s neck.

In the morning, after the girl leaves, Isabela catches herself holding the bottle in her lap and stroking the smooth glass with her thumbs. She dumps it in the trash in a fit of rage, and storms off to bathe. When she comes back, hair still damp from the bath, she throws all her clothes in her pack and leaves, telling herself she won’t look back.

Isabela makes it to the end of the hall before she stops, swears loudly, and walks briskly back to her room. She picks the bottle out from the trash, and takes a sharp breath when she sees a crack in the glass, fracturing it from the neck of the bottle to the largest sail on the ship, which is also bent at an angle.

This time, she places the bottle gingerly in her pack, nestling it safely between her clothes. Someone bumps into her back as she leaves, and she whirls on him and punches him across the face before she’s even aware she’s doing it.

Isabela skips town within the hour, and doesn’t take another lover for a month, then two, then a year.

* * *

 

It's late at night, the meager candlelight of her dump of a room sending long, flickering shadows across the walls, when she accidentally knocks the bottle to the floor. The sound of shattering glass makes something in Isabela shatter, too.  She stares in shock at the shards of the bottle, some of them still rocking back and forth on the floor, and slowly crouches down next to the mess. Numbly, she starts picking up the glass, depositing it in a pile beside the table the bottle had been on. One of the shards nicks her finger; she only notices because it leaves a bloody smear on the glass.

When Isabela picks up the ship, she hears something rattle inside it, and her brows knit together in confusion. She shakes it lightly to make sure she isn’t just hearing things. The ship rattles louder, and suddenly, memories of the day Hawke had given her the bottle rush back.

 _“You can’t see it, but below deck there’s a perfect replica of you with a dozen sailors in attendance,”_ Isabela hears Hawke say, the image of her lopsided smile clear as day in Isabela’s head.

“Impossible,” Isabela mutters to herself, pulling a dagger out from its sheath. “There’s no way…” Her heart hammers as she carefully slices the top of the ship off from the hull, and then it stops, her breath catching in her throat.

There aren’t a dozen, and they're far from perfect, but inside the hull of the ship are six oval-shaped, wooden things, each one no bigger than the first joint of her little finger. Isabela shakes them out into her hand; four of them are plainly painted brown, but her eyes catch on the two that have unique designs. One is painted black, with a red stripe across the middle, and the other is white, with a blue dash across the top.

There’s a crumpled slip of paper inside the hull, too, and it reveals a small hole — just big enough to fit one of the little wooden figures in it — on the side of the ship when Isabela takes it out and unfolds it.

 _Never doubt me,_ the note says, along with a crudely painted smirking face. The words were meant as a playful jibe, Isabela’s sure, but now, it hits her like a charging wyvern, and makes the air rush out of her lungs.

She runs a hand through her hair, laughing in disbelief. “You silly goose,” she says shakily, tilting her head back with another laugh. “You ridiculous, unbelievable, utterly daft tit.”

Isabela barely manages to catch the last ship to Kirkwall that night, and she rolls the black and white figurines in between her fingers throughout the trip. When she steps foot onto the filthy Kirkwall docks a week later, she feels more whole than she has for three years.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so my Hawke is a force mage, and on the wiki, it says that force mages need a huge amount of precision and control over their magic, lest they lose control over it. Since force magic is basically just telekinesis on a rawer level, I figured that if they refined their skills a bit further, they could probably control their magic enough to levitate smaller objects in the air. It's a lot harder, and takes a lot of concentration and practice, though — in the same way that it's more difficult to lightly chisel an ice sculpture than it is to just take a hammer and smash it to bits.
> 
> So in case you were wondering how she got those little figurines in there: it took her two hours and a lot of swearing, and when she was done, she barely made it to her bed before she passed out, exhausted.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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